"Positively American: Winning Back the Middle-Class Majority One Family at a Time" by Chuck Schumer

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT: Books of The Times
Schumer to Democrats: Challenges Ahead
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: January 26, 2007



New York’s senior senator, Charles E. Schumer, was a chief architect — along with Representative Rahm Emanuel in the House — of the Democrats’ 2006 campaign strategy that helped lead to their take-back of Congress in November, persuading incumbent Democrats in red states not to retire; countering Karl Rove’s much ballyhooed Republican machine with a hefty war chest and aggressive on-the-ground tactics of their own; and perhaps most important, recruiting and backing candidates (like Jon Tester in Montana, Bob Casey in Pennsylvania and James Webb in Virginia) who could compete in red-leaning states.

In the days after the election, Mr. Schumer cautioned his party against irrational exuberance, noting that the Democrats’ win was largely the result of Republican mistakes and the unpopularity of President Bush and the Iraq war, and warning that the party had a lot of work to do if it wanted to turn the ’06 results into a more lasting majority. In his provocative first book, “Positively American,” the senator amplifies these views while laying out a series of concrete proposals for winning back the middle class, from promoting college- tuition tax deductions to creating a kind of Manhattan Project for freeing the country from its dependence on fossil fuel.

Despite its cheesy red, white and blue cover and a hokey title that sounds like a line plucked from a campaign pamphlet, the book offers a smart, tough-minded appraisal of the Democratic Party’s weaknesses and challenges, addressing its current identity crisis, as well as many of the strategic and tactical disadvantages that political analysts like Thomas B. Edsall, Mark Halperin and John Harris have said the Democrats face in 2008 and the years to come.

At times, the volume seems to want to be a Democratic version of Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America,” but unlike Mr. Gingrich, Mr. Schumer — who is now the third-ranking Democrat in the Senate — is not a polarizing bomb-thrower. For that matter, his book, much like his post-’80s record in the House and Senate (which includes helping to write the 1994 crime bill, spearheading passage of the Brady Bill, supporting the death penalty and calling for increased Homeland Security measures) is deliberately centrist: practical and pragmatic in tone, Clintonian in its willingness to mix up proposals traditionally labeled liberal or conservative, eager to use common sense to find common ground on issues like education and immigration....

...if “Positively American” doesn’t lay out a new, overarching paradigm for the Democrats, it does provide Mr. Schumer’s party with at least the beginnings of a credible blueprint for change and renewal....

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/26/books/26Book.html

[fujiyama]

1. Schumer's been good on judicial nominees

but I really don't think he's a good spokesperson for winning back the middle class considering he voted for such awful anti-poor and middle class legislation like the bankruptcy bill.